When Salomi Took a Bet on an AI Food Tech Startup and Ended Up Building the Innovation Team That Defined It
- by: Harsha Bhurani
At eChai, we have been capturing stories of founders and the people who stood with them at the very beginning. These are the first hires, the ones who took responsibility early on, grew with the company, and shaped the founder's journey in ways far beyond their job description.
When my co-founder and I started AI Palette, we had a clear-eyed view of the problem we were going after. Food and beauty trends are deeply local, what sells in Tamil Nadu is not what sells in Maharashtra, and neither maps cleanly onto what's trending in Southeast Asia or the Middle East. We knew from day one that a team of people who all thought the same and ate the same food was going to be the worst possible foundation for that kind of work. Diversity, for us, wasn't a policy. It was a product decision.
Our first employee, Salomi Naik, found us through a cold message on LinkedIn which told us something immediately. She wasn't waiting to be discovered. She had come through multiple startups, had zero patience for bureaucracy, and a very high tolerance for ambiguity. In many ways, she wasn't just our first hire, she was a co-founder in everything but the formal title. She shaped how we worked, learned the real capabilities and limitations of AI by sitting closely with our data science teams, and eventually built and led our Innovation team, one that had a significant hand in shaping the product direction at AI Palette.
The ripple effect of that first hire was something I didn't fully appreciate until much later. Salomi set a tone, and that tone attracted more leaders like her. Our marketing leader, our VP of People Experience, the leadership team we built had strong women at the table, and it genuinely changed the quality of our decisions. There were moments, especially the harder people decisions, where that balance of perspectives made all the difference. Your first hire doesn't just fill a role. They set a template for what kind of company you're actually building.
Our first employee, Salomi Naik, found us through a cold message on LinkedIn which told us something immediately. She wasn't waiting to be discovered. She had come through multiple startups, had zero patience for bureaucracy, and a very high tolerance for ambiguity. In many ways, she wasn't just our first hire, she was a co-founder in everything but the formal title. She shaped how we worked, learned the real capabilities and limitations of AI by sitting closely with our data science teams, and eventually built and led our Innovation team, one that had a significant hand in shaping the product direction at AI Palette.
The ripple effect of that first hire was something I didn't fully appreciate until much later. Salomi set a tone, and that tone attracted more leaders like her. Our marketing leader, our VP of People Experience, the leadership team we built had strong women at the table, and it genuinely changed the quality of our decisions. There were moments, especially the harder people decisions, where that balance of perspectives made all the difference. Your first hire doesn't just fill a role. They set a template for what kind of company you're actually building.
